When I was 13, I along with four friends started our own country. This was well before the Republic of Molossia was a gleam in someone’s eye, and predated the founding of the notorious Principality of Sealand by at least a few years. Therefore I think we deserve some recognition as pioneers of the modern micronational movement.
Sadly, none of our founding documents survived the equivalent of our Alexandria Library fire: Our mothers cleaning out our bedrooms after we left for college and other adult pursuits.
All five of us — Charles, David, Frank, Russell and I — lived on the same street in Mobile, within three blocks of one another.
By the way, I have a theory about why Baby Boomers have such whitebread names: After a depression and a world war, our parents’ quest for normality included giving their kids the most generic American names they could think of. Steve, David, Frank, Charles, Russell, Larry, James/Jim, Richard, William/Bill, Robert/Bob. Betty, Helen, Mary, Sally, Jane, Louise, Cathy, Susan, Rebecca/Becky, Deborah/Debbie.
Speaking of Jameses, our street was the same one where Jimmy Buffett spent his baby years, before his family moved away. Had they stayed, I wonder if young Jimmy might have joined us in our state-building project. More likely he would have spurned us for more productive pursuits — such as learning to play guitar.
We called our country the Union of Confederate States, in honor of our historical antecedents, the United States (aka “the Union”) and the Confederacy. We appointed ourselves governor of our respective states, whose borders were the boundaries of our families’ subdivision lots. Then we set about the really fun stuff of making maps, flags, constitutions and laws.
As the westernmost state, mine was called Westavia, with my bedroom as the capital.
Because of intervening lots, most of our states were non-contiguous. We fixed this in the most expedient way by redrawing maps to take in as many neighbors as needed to unite the country. This also tripled our population.
We didn’t bother to inform our newly acquired citizens of their changed status, although they could have known if they had bothered to read the hand-written signs we posted on telephone poles at all the borders.
We briefly considered going door to door and asking that they start paying taxes to us, but agreed to leave that to later. Undoubtedly factoring into this decision was imagining the reaction of the grumpy man who lived across the street from David.
Politics in the UCS soon took a dark turn. I’m not proud of my role in it, but for purposes of truth and reconciliation, here goes.
For reasons now hazy, David and I met in the national capital, his attic, to rewrite the constitution. We ditched the presidency and substituted a co-consulship. David and I would be interim consuls until new elections could be held. However, the convoluted language we used actually granted us dictatorial powers for life.
Charles and Frank, bored with the game, gave their approval without reading it. Soon after, they dissolved their states and ceded their lands back to the United States.
Russell was a tougher nut. He saw through our power grab, and his response was to secede. David and I separated our states as well, but remained friendly allies. When Wasserland — that is, Russell — built a fort on Westavian territory a dirt clod battle ensued, which the Westavian-Gristerran alliance handily won.
During the long peace that followed (two months?), I spent the time on such pursuits as creating currency and even a language for the Republic of Westavia, of which I was president (for life, of course).
The money was hand-drawn slips of paper featuring our national bird, the mourning dove. Called the desme, each unit was worth 10 American cents and could be exchanged for a dime’s worth of anything produced within Westavia. Westavia mostly just produced paper money and Westavian language dictionaries, though.
Since not even my brother would put a dime in the Westavian treasury to obtain a desme, and he showed zero interest in learning to speak Westavian, the whole project was a rather lonely one. Even redrawing the map to encompass the whole neighborhood, which I rechristened the Westavian Empire, couldn’t satisfy my hegemonic aspirations if no one recognized my hegemony.
My career as a tyrant, a toothless one in any case, gave way to more normal adolescent interests. Normal people, of any age, don’t want to rule others anyway. This isn’t true of a certain subset of humanity, though, who spend their lives fighting to gain power over others and to keep and enlarge that power.
Some of them play the power game for pelf and privilege. These are the political grifters and self-dealers whose motives are at least easy for normal humans to understand.
Not so fathomable to normal humans are the narcissists and sociopaths who frequently rise to be president or prime minister, or who pull the strings of presidents and prime ministers. Despite history’s abundant lessons, it comes as a shock to many whenever persons elevated to political “leadership” are revealed as completely conscienceless, utterly ruthless and lacking even a shred of shame.
It may be fun playing tyrant, as I did as ruler of my pretend nation, or conqueror, as in a game of Risk. In the real world the consequences of accepting political coercion as the proper way to order society have been the unnecessary immiseration of millions and death and destruction on a horrific scale.
In a freer and more rational world no human being will be allowed to “govern” — i.e., rule — another, and anyone who tries will be rightly ignored or shunned from polite company.
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